Saturday, December 29, 2007

My xmas holiday reading has included a book about Indian mythology. I have found the origins of Kali very interesting. Parvati (a maternal godess) was criticised heavily by her lover Shiva for many things, one of them being her point of difference to him, the darkness of her skin. She wanted to have a baby with him and he was withholding his seed, so in order to please him she sloughed off all that displeased him. The stuff sloughed off became Kali.

So reclaiming the 'dark' parts of our female nature that differentiate us from men is what Kali is about. She embodies the feminine power feared in patriarchy.By the way, Parvati ended up making a baby by moulding the dirt from her body into the form of a human, it gained the head of an elephant and became Ganesha.

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My name is Talisa, I am an artist and educator. This is an on-line archive of stuff that interests, entertains and informs me, with links to relevant sites (linkbacks are found in the title of each post) and postings of my observations, insights and artworks. Thanks for dropping by.

"Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume there is no hope, you guarantee there will be no hope."- Noam Chomsky